“Who’re all these people?” asked Charles, frowning.
“I don’t recognize them,” said Jade.
“I guess they’re friends of Hannah’s,” said Leulah.
“You see her?”
“No.”
“Even if she was here,” said Milton, “it’d be impossible to tell which one she was. Everyone’s wearin’ masks.”
“I’m freezing,” said Jade.
“We should have masks,” Milton said. “That’s what the invite said.”
“Where the fuck are we going to find masks now?” asked Charles.
“There’s Perón,” said Lu.
“Where?”
“The woman with the sparkly halo thing.”
“That’s not her.”
“Seriously,” said Jade uneasily, “what are we even doing here?”
“You guys can sit here all night,” said Nigel, “but I, for one, am going to enjoy myself.” He was wearing his Zorro mask and his glasses. He looked like an erudite raccoon. “Who else wants to have some fun?”
For some reason, he was looking at me.
“What do you say, old broad? Shall we dance?”
I adjusted my wig.
We left the others, hurrying across the yard — one nerdy raccoon and an inverted carrot — to Hannah’s patio.
It was jam packed. Four men dressed as rats and a mermaid beauty queen with a half-mask of blue sequins were actually in the swimming pool, laughing, throwing a volleyball. We decided to make our way inside (see “Walking upstream in the Zambezi River during a flood period,” Quests, 1992, p. 212). We crammed ourselves into a space between the plaid couch and a pirate talking to a devil oblivious to the repercussions of his massive sweaty back when he suddenly and without warning backed it into two much smaller people.
For twenty minutes, we didn’t do anything but sip vodka out of the red plastic cups and watch the people — none of whom we recognized — crawling, slithering, waddling their way around the room in costumes ranging from the teensy-weensy to the wholly insurmountable.
“Butterfly hazy!” Nigel shouted, shaking his head.
I shook my head and he repeated himself.
“This is totally crazy!”
I nodded. Hannah, Eva Brewster and the animals were nowhere to be found, only graceless birds, doughy sumo wrestlers, unvelcroed reptiles, a Queen who’d removed her crown and distractedly gnawed on it as her eyes strolled the room, probably searching for a King or Ace to come royally flush her.
If Dad had been present, he’d undoubtedly have commented that most of the adults present were “dangerously close to relinquishing their dignity” and that it was sad and disturbing, because “they were all searching for something they’d never recognize, even if they found it.” Dad was notoriously severe when it came to commenting upon the behaviors of all people other than himself. Yet, watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah’s neat stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you’re so busy waiting for, you don’t notice it never actually comes.
“What are they speaking?” Nigel shouted in my ear.
I followed his eyes to the astronaut standing a few feet away. He was holding his pressure helmet, a stocky man with a sideways sigma hairline () talking vigorously to a gorilla.
“I think it’s Greek,” I said, surprised. (“The language of the Titans, the Oracles, 
” said Dad. (This last bit apparently meant “the language of heroes.”) Dad loved showing off his bizarre aptitude when it came to foreign languages. (He claimed to be fluent in twelve; yet fluent often meant yes and no, plus a few impressive phrases, and enjoyed repeating a certain witticism about Americans and their dearth of language skills: “Americans need to master lingual before they attempt bilingual.”)
“I wonder who that is,” I said to Nigel. The gorilla took off its head, revealing a small Chinese woman. She nodded, but answered in some other guttural language that made a person’s mouth break-dance. I wasn’t even sure I’d heard Greek in the first place. I leaned closer.
“Aye, Savannah,” said Nigel, squeezing my arm.
“Again,” I shouted.
“I see Hannah.”
He grabbed my hand and yanked me through two Elvises.
“So where’d you come from?” asked Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii. “Reno,” said a very sweaty Elvis on Tour drinking from a blue plastic cup.
“She went upstairs,” Nigel said into my ear, trying to get us past Sodom and Gomorrah, Leopold and Loeb, Tarzan and Jane, who’d just managed to find each other in this jungle and were talking with a great deal of clothing fiddling. I didn’t know why Nigel wanted to find Hannah, but midway up, I saw only a six-ton Tyrannosaurus Ex who’d unzipped his costume and sat down on his rubber head.
“Fuck.”
“Why do you want to find her?” I shouted, “I thought the—” and just as I turned to look out over the bobbing wigs and masks, I saw her.
Her face was eclipsed by the brim of a top hat (only a white sliver of chin and red mouth was visible) but I knew it was she, due to the oil and vinegar reaction her presence had with all backdrops, atmospheres and given conditions. The young, the old, the pretty and plain merged to compose some standard room of talking people, but Hannah was permanently separate and distinctive, as if there were always an unmistakable, thin black line drawn around her, or a YOU ARE HERE arrow discreetly floated in her wake reading, SHE IS HERE. Or perhaps, due to a certain relationship she had with incandescence, her face exerted a gravitational pull on 50 percent of all the light in the room.
She was dressed in a tuxedo and heading our way, leading a man up the stairs. She held his left hand as if it were expensive, something she couldn’t afford to lose.
Nigel saw her too. “Who’s she dressed as?”
“Marlene Dietrich, Morocco, 1930. We need to hide.”
But Nigel shook his head and held on to my wrist. As we were trapped by a sheikh waiting for someone to come out of the upstairs bathroom and a group of men dressed as tourists (Polaroids, Hawaiian shirts) I could do nothing but brace myself for what was coming.
I was marginally reassured, however, when I saw the man. If she’d been with Doc three weeks ago, at least she’d traded up and was now arm in arm with Big Daddy (see The Great Patriarchs of American Theatre:1821–1990, Park, 1992). Though he was gray haired, overweight in that Montgomery, Alabama way (when the stomach looked like a great big bag of loot and the rest of the body ignored that rude, uncouth section, going about its business of being perfectly fit and trim), something about him was satisfying, impressive. Dressed in a Red Army uniform (presumably as Mao Zedong), he had a chancellor’s posture, and his face, if not flat-out handsome, was at the very least splendid: rich, glistening and rosy, like a block of salted ham at a state dinner. It was also evident he was a little bit in love with her. Dad said being in love had nothing to do with words, action or the heart (“the most overrated of organs”), but with the eyes (“Everything essential concerns the eyes.”) and this man’s eyes couldn’t stop slipping and sliding off every curve of her face.